Lingchi (simplified Chinese: 凌迟; traditional Chinese: 凌遲; pinyin: língchí; Wade–Giles: ling-ch'ih, alternately transliterated ling chi or leng t'che), translated variously as death by a thousand cuts (simplified Chinese: 杀千刀; traditional Chinese: 殺千刀) or “千刀万剐”, the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until it was banned in 1905. In this form of execution, a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death. The term "língchí" is derived from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly. Lingchi was reserved for crimes viewed as especially severe, such as treason, or killing one's parents. The process involved tying the condemned prisoner to a wooden frame, usually in a public place. The flesh was then cut from the body in multiple slices in a process that was not specified in detail in Chinese law, and therefore most likely varied. In later times, opium was sometimes administered either as an act of mercy or as a way of preventing fainting. The punishment worked on three levels: as a form of public humiliation, as a slow and lingering death, and as a punishment after death.

According to the Confucian principle of filial piety or xiào, to alter one's body or to cut the body are considered unfilial practices (see Xiao Jing). Lingchi therefore contravenes the demands of xiao. In addition, to be cut to pieces meant that the body of the victim would not be "whole" in a spiritual life after death. This method of execution became a fixture in the image of China among some Westerners.[1]

Lingchi could be used for the torture and execution of a living person, or applied as an act of humiliation after death. It was meted out for major offenses such as treason, mass murder, patricide or the murder of one's master or employer.[2] Emperors used it to threaten people and sometimes ordered it for minor offenses.[3][4] There were forced convictions and wrongful executions.[5][6] Some emperors meted out this punishment to the family members of their enemies.[7][8][9][10] While it is difficult to obtain accurate details of how the executions took place, they generally consisted of cuts to the arms, legs, and chest leading to amputation of limbs, followed by decapitation or a stab to the heart. If the crime was less serious or the executioner merciful, the first cut would be to the throat causing death; subsequent cuts served solely to dismember the corpse.

Art historian James Elkins[11] argues that extant photos of the execution clearly show that the "death by division" (as it was termed by German criminologist R. Heindl) involved some degree of dismemberment while the subject was living. Elkins also argues that, contrary to the apocryphal version of "death by a thousand cuts", the actual process could not have lasted long. The condemned individual is not likely to have remained conscious and aware (if even alive) after one or two severe wounds, so the entire process could not have included more than a "few dozen" wounds. In the Yuan dynasty, one hundred cuts were inflicted[12] but by the Ming dynasty there were records of three thousand incisions.[13][14] It is described as a fast process lasting no longer than fifteen to twenty minutes.[15]Available photographic records[16][17] seem to prove the speed of the event as the crowd remains consistent across the series of photographs. Moreover, these photographs show a striking contrast between the stream of blood that soaks the left flank of the victim and the lack of blood on the right side, possibly showing that the first or the second cut has reached the heart.[18][19] The coup de grâce was all the more certain when the family could afford a bribe to have a stab to the heart inflicted first.[20] Some emperors ordered three days of cutting[21][22] while others may have ordered specific tortures before the execution,[23] or a longer execution.[24][25][26] For example, records show that during his execution Yuan Chonghuan could be heard shouting for half a day before his death.[27] The flesh of the victims may also have been sold as medicine.[28] As an official punishment, death by slicing may also have involved slicing the bones, cremation, and scattering of the deceased's ashes.

The Western perception of língchí has often differed considerably from the actual practice, and some misconceptions persist to the present. The distinction between the sensationalized Western myth and the Chinese reality was noted by Westerners as early as 1895. That year, Australian traveler G.E. Morrison, who claimed to have witnessed an execution by slicing, wrote that "Ling chi [was] commonly, and quite wrongly, translated as 'death by slicing into 10,000 pieces' — a truly awful description of a punishment whose cruelty has been extraordinarily misrepresented... The mutilation is ghastly and excites our horror as an example of barbarian cruelty; but it is not cruel, and need not excite our horror, since the mutilation is done, not before death, but after."[29]

According to apocryphal lore, língchí began when the torturer, wielding an extremely sharp knife, began by putting out the eyes, rendering the condemned incapable of seeing the remainder of the torture and, presumably, adding considerably to the psychological terror of the procedure. Successive rather minor cuts chopped off ears, nose, tongue, fingers, toes and genitals before proceeding to cuts that removed large portions of flesh from more sizable parts, e.g., thighs and shoulders. The entire process was said to last three days, and to total 3,600 cuts. The heavily carved bodies of the deceased were then put on a parade for a show in the public.[30] Some victims were reportedly given doses of opium, but accounts differ as to whether the drug was said to amplify or alleviate suffering.

J. M. Roberts, in Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901 to 2000 (2000), writes "the traditional punishment of death by slicing... became part of the western image of Chinese backwardness as the 'death of a thousand cuts.'" Roberts then notes that slicing "was ordered, in fact, for K'ang Yu-Wei, a man termed the 'Rousseau of China', and a major advocate of intellectual and government reform in the 1890s."[31]

Although officially outlawed by the Qing government in 1905,[32] língchí became a widespread Western symbol of the Chinese penal system from the 1910s on, and in Zhao Erfeng's administration.[33] Three sets of photographs shot by French soldiers in 1904–5 were the basis for later mythification. The abolition was immediately enforced, and definite: no official sentences of língchí were performed in China after April 1905.

Regarding the use of opium, as related in the introduction to Morrison's book, Sir Meyrick Hewlett insisted that "most Chinese people sentenced to death were given large quantities of opium before execution, and Morrison avers that a charitable person would be permitted to push opium into the mouth of someone dying in agony, thus hastening the moment of decease." At the very least, such tales were deemed credible to British officials in China and other Western observers.

Some officials often used that to torture the rebels.[44][45] The punishment remained in the Qing dynasty code of laws for persons convicted of high treason and other serious crimes. Língchí was abolished as a result of the 1905 revision of the Chinese penal code by Shen Jiaben (沈家本, 1840–1913).[46][47][48] Reports from Qing dynasty jurists such as Shen Jiaben show that executioners' customs varied, as the regular way to perform this penalty was not specified in detail in the penal code.[citation needed]

This form of execution was also known from Vietnam, notably being used as the method of execution of the French missionary Joseph Marchand in 1835 as part of the repression following the unsuccessful Lê Văn Khôi revolt.

As Western countries moved to abolish similar punishments, some Westerners began to focus attention on the methods of execution used in China. As early as 1866, the time when Britain itself moved to abolish its own cruel method of hanging, drawing, and quartering, Thomas Francis Wade, then serving with the British diplomatic mission in China, unsuccessfully urged the abolition of língchí.

The first proposal for abolishing lingchi was submitted by Lu You 陸游 (1125–1210) in a memorial to the emperor under the Southern Song dynasty. Lu You's elaborated argumentation against lingchi was piously copied and transmitted by generations of scholars, among them influential jurists of all dynasties, till the late Qing reformer Shen Jiaben introduced it in his 1905 memorial that obtained the abolition, eventually. This anti-lingchi trend met a more general attitude opposed to "cruel and unusual punishments' (such as the exposure of the head) which the Tang had not included in the canonic table of the Five Punishments, and that defined the plainly legal ways of punishing crime. Hence the abolitionist trend is deeply ingrained in the Chinese legal tradition, rather than being purely derived from Western influences.

Sir Henry Norman, The People and Politics of the Far East (1895). Norman was a widely travelled writer and photographer whose collection is now owned by the University of Cambridge. Norman gives an eye-witness account of various physical punishments and tortures inflicted in a magistrate's court (yamen) and of the execution by beheading of fifteen men. He gives the following graphic account of a lingchi execution but does not claim to have witnessed such an execution himself. "[The executioner] grasping handfuls from the fleshy parts of the body such as the thighs and breasts slices them away... the limbs are cut off piecemeal at the wrists and ankles, the elbows and knees, shoulders and hips. Finally the condemned is stabbed to the heart and the head is cut off."[49]

G.E. Morrison, An Australian in China (1895) differs from some other reports in stating that most Ling Chi mutilations are in fact made post mortem. Morrison wrote his description based on an account related by a claimed eyewitness: "The prisoner is tied to a rude cross: he is invariably deeply under the influence of opium. The executioner, standing before him, with a sharp sword makes two quick incisions above the eyebrows, and draws down the portion of skin over each eye, then he makes two more quick incisions across the breast, and in the next moment he pierces the heart, and death is instantaneous. Then he cuts the body in pieces; and the degradation consists in the fragmentary shape in which the prisoner has to appear in heaven."[50]

Tienstin (Tianjin), The China Year Book (1927), p 1401, contains contemporary reports from fighting in Guangzhou (Canton) between the Nanjing government and Communist forces. Stories of various atrocities are related, including accounts of língchí. There is no mention of opium, and these cases appear to be government propaganda.

The Times, (9 December 1927), A Times journalist reported from the city of Canton that the Communists were targeting Christian priests and that "It was announced that Father Wong was to be publicly executed by the slicing process."

George Roerich, "Trails to Inmost Asia" (1931), p 119, relates the story of the assassination of Yang Tseng-hsin, Governor of Sinkiang in July 1928, by the bodyguard of his foreign minister Fan Yao-han. Fan Yao-han was seized, and he and his daughter were both executed by ling-chi, the minister made to watch his daughter's execution first. Roerich was not an eyewitness to this event, having already returned to India by the date of the execution.

George Ryley Scott, History of Torture (1940) claims that many were executed this way by the Chinese Communist insurgents; he cites claims made by the Nanking government in 1927. It is perhaps uncertain whether these claims were anti-communist propaganda. Scott also uses the term "the slicing process" and differentiates between the different types of execution in different parts of the country. There is no mention of opium. Riley's book contains a picture of a sliced corpse (with no mark to the heart) that was killed in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1927. It gives no indication of whether the slicing was done post-mortem. Scott claims it was common for the relatives of the condemned to bribe the executioner to kill the condemned before the slicing procedure began.

The first Western photographs of língchí were taken in 1890 by William Arthur Curtis of Kentucky in Guangzhou (Canton).[51]

French soldiers stationed in Beijing had the opportunity to photograph three different língchí executions in 1905:

Wang Weiqin 王維勤, a former official who killed two families, executed on 31 October 1904[52][53]

Unknown, reason unknown, possibly a young deranged boy who killed his mother, and was executed in January 1905. Photographs were published in various volumes of Georges Dumas' Nouveau traité de psychologie, 8 vols., Paris, 1930–43, and again nominally by Bataille (in fact by Lo Duca), who mistakenly appended abstracts of Fou-tchou-li's executions as related by Carpeaux (see below).[54]

Fou-tchou-li or Fúzhūli (Chinese: 符珠哩),[55] a Mongol guard who killed his master, the Prince of Inner Mongolian Aohan Banner, and who was executed on 10 April 1905; as língchí was to be abolished two weeks later, this was presumably the last attested case of it in Chinese history,[56] or said Kang Xiaoba (康小八)[57] Photographs appeared in books by Matignon (1910), and Carpeaux (1913), the latter claiming (falsely) that he was present.[citation needed] Carpeaux's narrative was mistakenly, but persistently, associated with photographs published by Dumas and Bataille. Even related to the correct set of photos, Carpeaux's narrative is highly dubious; for instance, an examination of the Chinese judicial archives show that Carpeaux bluntly invented the execution decree. The proclamation is reported to state: "The Mongolian princes demand that the aforesaid Fou-Tchou-Le, guilty of the murder of Prince Ao-Han-Ouan, be burned alive, but the Emperor finds this torture too cruel and condemns Fou-Tchou-Li to slow death by leng-tch-e (different spelling of lingchi, cutting into pieces)."[58]

Photographic material and other sources are available online at the Chinese Torture Database (Iconographic, Historical and Literary Approaches of an Exotic Representation) hosted by the Institut d'Asie Orientale (CNRS, France).[59]

Accounts of lingchi or the extant photographs have inspired or referenced in numerous artistic, literary, and cinematic media. Some works have attempted to put the process in a historical context; others, possibly due to the scarcity of detailed historical information, have attempted to extrapolate the details or present innovations of method that may be products of an author's creative license. Some of these descriptions may have influenced modern public perceptions of the historic practice.

Susan Sontag mentions the 1905 case in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). One reviewer wrote that though Sontag includes no photographs in her book—a volume about photography—"she does tantalisingly describe a photograph that obsessed the philosopher Georges Bataille, in which a Chinese criminal, while being chopped up and slowly flayed by executioners, rolls his eyes heavenwards in transcendent bliss."[60]

The philosopher Georges Bataille wrote about lingchi in L'expérience intérieure (1943) and in Le coupable (1944). He included five pictures in his The Tears of Eros (1961; translated to English and published by City Lights in 1989).[61] Historians Timothy Brook, Jérome Bourgon and Gregory Blue, criticized Bataille for his language, mistakes and dubious content.[62][63]

In the novel Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser, Sir Harry Flashman describes a prisoner being bound tightly in a thin wire mesh through which nubs of flesh protrude. These are then cut off by the torturer with a sharp razor. In order to kill the prisoner, the razor is run quickly over many nubs of flesh at once. Barry Hughart outlines a similar method in his fantasy-historical novels set in China.

In the novel Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, Wang Xifeng makes reference to the punishment in the proverb "A man that is sentenced to death by a thousand cuts will dare to pull the emperor off his horse."

In the novel The Journeyer by Gary Jennings, an executioner explains to the main character, Marco Polo, that one-thousand pieces of paper are placed in a container, and a paper is drawn out to determine where the cut will be made. For this procedure, there are 333 designated body parts, and each part is represented three times, for a total of 999 slips of paper, with the 1,000th paper representing immediate death. In the case of a finger, if the first paper drawn denoted a particular finger, the digit would be removed at the first joint; the second time a paper is drawn indicating the same finger, another section to the next joint is amputated. The third paper related to the same finger would indicate final amputation. Jennings also fictionalizes in the book that, in an extended form of the torture, the body parts and blood are fed to the condemned as his only nourishment.

In the 1965 novel Farabeuf, author Salvador Elizondo uses one of the 1905 lingchí photographs, along with the story of a 19th-century French surgeon, to explore eroticism, photography, and memory. Farabeuf appears both as a secret agent who witnessed and photographed the execution, and as obsessed with the use of torture as a form of erotic ceremony. The reproduction of the 1905 photograph appears along the climax of his engulfing narrative, widely perceived as one of the main works of Mexican literature of the 1960s.

Death by slow slicing is a central literary theme in Mo Yan's novel "Sandalwood Death" set during the Boxer rebellion, which devotes an entire chapter to a detailed narration of the slicing of Qian Xiongfei by executioner Zhao Jia.

In the 1956 film The Conqueror, this execution was called the "slow death". Three of the main characters threaten to see the punishment inflicted at different points in the story. The "slow death" as described in The Conqueror accords with the more sensationalistic depictions of slow slicing, but with the added refinement that the victim's severed parts are to be fed to animals before him.

John Zorn composed a piece titled Leng Tch'e, which was recorded by his group Naked City and released in 1992. The album's cover art includes a photo from the January 1905 execution. There is also a Belgian grindcore band named Leng Tch'e.

In the Murdoch Mysteries episode "Kung Fu Crabtree," a Chinese man named Wu Chang confesses to the murder of a diplomat to protect his sister. He states at the end of the episode that he will be taken back to China "in a year or two" - the episode is set in 1901 - and subjected to "death by a thousand cuts." Wu was accused of being a Boxer, despite actually being a democratic reformer loyal to the deposed Guangxu Emperor.

In The 100 episode "Spacewalker", Lincoln explains that Finn's punishment for killing 18 Grounders in a village massacre is that Finn must be tied to a stake, and slowly cut and stabbed all night long by the grieving families of those he killed, until eventually being left to die of his wounds. Since he killed 18, Lincoln explains, he must suffer the pain of 18 deaths. Though it is not mentioned that the punishment is derived from the Chinese 'Lingchi', the structure of the punishment itself is very similar, and Lincoln does refer to it as "death by a thousand cuts".